I told you gay sex was bad!
Oh, boy, how the intelligentsia is all aflutter about the latest result from a “publication” (funded by a couple of far right-wing Christianist organizations) by a right-wing “intellectual” whose multimillion dollar study purportedly shows that the gays and lesbians are bad parents. Only, the study doesn’t actually look at any real gay or lesbian parents, or track any kids over time, or control for the usual suspects of negative outcomes. Several other real scholars are preparing a more formal rebuttal, not that this piece of shit deserved publication, much less rebuttal. No, it just compares people who were NOT in a married biological couple but knew that a parent had had a same sex relationship with people whose parents were in a stable het marriage. Everything about this paper reeks of a right-wing hit job. I can hardly even seriously engage the data because I doubt its veracity. Yeah. I said that. Ideologues of this caliber can’t be trusted with anything, and here we’re supposed to trust the estimates of a study with sketchy details, collected by a fly-by-night beltway bandit group, and analyzed by a committed religious ideologue? This wasn’t Social Science Research level material, in my opinion, and I”m on the editorial board. But, so is Bradley Wilcox! Worse even than Regnerus’ phony study was the opinion paper by some sissy-looking mormon guy from LSU. I’m sorry. When did we start publishing right-wing opinion as if it was social science research?
But, I can find some good in all of this. Thanks to these asshats, I now look sane and reasonable. People used to think I was some wackjob paranoid, ranting about the right wingers taking over sociology, and dissing “public sociology”–which was uncool. Right. You got your public sociology right here. You want to count this shit for promotion?
15/06/2012 at 1:27 pm |
Heh, when I first read the story, my thought was: “A Christian sociologist with an obvious agenda publishes a study so flawed that even *I* (an abject layperson) can immediately spot the glaring problem before it’s even pointed out to me? Oh man, Darren is going to flip…”
I think you are right with your last paragraph. Since I know next-to-nothing about sociology, I’ve always wondered if you’ve been exaggerating about the Christianist takeover of the sociology of religion. Shit like this makes me see you are dead serious.
15/06/2012 at 2:42 pm |
Yeah, I learned about it from a perfectly sane and normal sociologist at Columbia who works in a different area and was shocked to see such shit. And, if you read Regnerus’ SLATE piece you can see this isn’t just reporters distorting the implication of his “findings’—it’s him distorting the implications of his findings and mainstream media giving him a huge megaphone to spout off right wing propaganda–during GLBT Month, no less!
18/06/2012 at 7:43 pm |
I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate anything about the Christian agenda in any arena.
21/06/2012 at 12:10 am |
The methodology on that piece makes my head swim. I think I found a new example for upper level courses of bad data connections. Christ on a stick.
02/05/2013 at 4:12 pm |
[...] to prevent further harm to the community that has been affected by this study? On our watch, a study that should never have reached publication ended up reaching the Supreme Court. We alerted [...]